I've been browsing some character pages on Wikipedia, and I loved how characters have an infobox that displays their basic information. It's simple stuff like "age", "height", and "name", along with a character image. It's a subtle way to spice pages up.
Funny you should ask... If this is good, I can simply copy it from a different wiki that I wrote it for. ("title" is what you called "Name", and "subtitle" is what you called "foreign forms".) Or we can discuss what we want and come up with something better-suited for this wiki.
Infobox Character
| title =
| subtitle =
| image =
| caption =
| Other Names =
| Source Fiction =
| Birthday =
| Age =
| Gender =
| Height =
| Hair Color =
| Eye Color =
| Blood Type =
| Three Sizes =
| Actor =
There are some things to tweak. "source fiction" is an iffy field... most character pages are a subpage of a work the characters are from. If I go to Akira/Characters (a random page I pulled up), I expect all characters to be from Akira, so the field is a bit redundant. The only time when we need it (that I can think of) is if one character originated in a fairy tale or folktale. For example, In The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Princess Kaguya did not originate from the film, rather she originated from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. It may cause some confusion.
We should include a "Central Trope" entry (the trope that best describes a character). After all, this is a troping wiki. It's a nice way to quickly tell what a character's role in the story is (The Hero does not count as a Central Trope; it is too vague).
What do you mean by "Three Sizes"?
Everything else looks good, and it's nice to see you remembered the "Actor" field (I don't know how I forgot something that important).
"source fiction" is an iffy field... most character pages are a subpage of a work the characters are from.
Most, but not all, as John Munch, Superman, and Tarzan show us. I'd rather make the field optional than remove it altogether.
"Central Trope"... I'm worried about edit wars there. For example, what is the central trope of the title character of Kiki's Delivery Service? Determinator? Plucky Girl? Cute Witch? And if we allow more than one, somebody's going to misunderstand and copy the entire trope list into the infobox. Your earlier suggestion "Central Archetype" seems like a better name to me.
Another thought: Should we make this sufficiently generic that it can also be used on Creator pages? Or would it make more sense to do two infoboxes for people -- "character" for the fictional people and "creator" for the real life people?
This is the information sidebar template for characters.
The Template
{{Infobox character
| title =
| subtitle =
| image =
| caption =
| Central Archetype =
| Source Fiction =
| First Appearance =
| Actor =
| Age =
| Birthday =
| Gender =
| Height =
| Hair Color =
| Eye Color =
| Blood Type =
| Three Sizes =
}}
Notes
title is the character's name. This is the only required field.
subtitle could be the character's name in the original language, or a noble title, or a sobriquet.
image is the name of the picture you uploaded to illustrate the character, without the "File:" prefix. Note: The image will display at 200 pixels wide in this infobox, so please choose something that looks good at that size. If no image is listed, a placeholder will be displayed.
caption is a caption for the image, and is optional. If you don't add an image, the caption will not display.
Central Archetype is the character's main role in the story.
Source Fiction is the body of fiction – the "ficton", to use Robert A. Heinlein's term – that the character originally comes from. (No, please don't list every single work that John Munch has appeared in; just list the first one.) If you're using this infobox on a Characters subpage and the work isn't a crossover, it's safe to leave this field blank unless the character comes from a different work.
First Appearance is the name of the work where the character first appeared (for example, "Detective Comics #27")
Actor is the character's actor or voice actor (or both, for live-action works dubbed into other languages).
Age, Birthday, Gender, Height, Hair Color, Eye Color, Blood Type, and Three Sizes are all as of the character's first appearance.
Birthday should be day and month. (For example, original-anime Sailor Moon's birthday should be listed as "June 30", not "June 30, 1978".) Write it out long-form, please; "2-5" is May 2 in most of the world, but many people in the USA read that as February 5.
Gender is the gender that the character presents as, not the character's birth gender.
Three Sizes is for females only, and if included should be listed in the order bust-waist-hips.
If we were to include "Weapon of Choice" it would follow we should also include some of the other Signature Tropes, such as Trademark Favorite Food, Signature Device, Catch Phrase, and maybe even Signature Colors. Catch phrase in particular may be more universal than Weapon of Choice, as it doesn't just apply to warrior characters. I guess it boils down to how many fields we'd like the infobox to have?
That's why I put the template onto a live page - so we could see how many lines it takes before we start getting large patches of whitespace in the page text. It turns out that using three or four demographic lines are already creating large patches of whitespace.
I'd be hesitant to add more lines to the infobox unless I had some evidence that we're actually going to write both long descriptions and long trope lists for all characters. (Although I can be convinced otherwise, and the infobox can always be edited later.)
I think you might be able to argue that, on pages where there are more information provided by demographic lines, characters are more developed and you have more information about the characters, so you can write a longer description with more tropes. Therefore, if a character has a large demographic listing it should have a large description.
However, I think this is going to be a "reality does not match expectations" thing. I wouldn't rely on this coming true on every page. Even if some cool information isn't included on the infobox, you can always include it in the description.
That said, "freezing" the demographic information isn't the only solution to this. We might come up with some sort of "editing" page policy and put it in some adminstrivia page, which states that you should not add demographic information to a character until you are sure it will not create excessive whitespace. For example, I can comfortably fit 20-30 lines in Puella Magi Madoka Magica/Characters, but you can't do so on other pages.
It does. My logic is that it's better to have a field and don't use it, than wanting to use a field that doesn't exist. All of these are nice bits of information that help add flavour to the page. Ultimately, it depends on what the admins think, and on how many fields we can fit before MediaWiki starts to have issues.
